he has a deep love of nature, woodland places and quiet fields; he
loves old and beautiful buildings with a tenderness that makes it a
real misery to him to think of their destruction, and even their
renovation; and he has, too, the poetic passion for flowers; he is
happiest in his garden. But beside all this, he has the Puritan
virtues strongly developed; he loves work, and duty, and simplicity
of life, with all his heart; he is an almost rigid judge of conduct
and character, and sometimes flashes out in a half Pharisaical
scorn against meanness, selfishness, and weakness. He is naturally
a pure Ruskinian; he would like to destroy railways and machinery
and manufactories; he would like working-men to enjoy their work,
and dance together on the village green in the evenings; but he is
not a faddist at all, and has the healthiest and simplest power of
enjoyment. His severity has mellowed with age, while his love of
beauty has, I think, increased; he does not care for argument, and
is apt to say pathetically that he knows that his fellow-disputant
is right, but that he cannot change his opinions, and does not
desire to. He is passing, it seems to me, into a very gracious and
soft twilight of life; he grows more patient, more tender, more
serene. His face, always beautiful, has taken on an added beauty of
faithful service and gracious sweetness.

We began one evening to discuss a book that has lately been
published, a book of very sad, beautiful, wise, intimate letters,
written by a woman of great perception, high intellectual gifts and
passionate affections. These letters were published, not long after
her death, by her children, to whom many of them were addressed.

He had read the book, I found, with deep emotion; but he said very
decidedly that it ought not to have been published, at all events